A blog about tabletop hobby and or strategy games, with a side order of electronic turn based goodness here and there. Now with tons of retro gaming content both electronic and tabletop. Also with 20% more self loathing douchebaggery!

Monday, June 30, 2014

Mechwarrior Online: Clans are Here. Content Isn't.

Yep. People dumb enough to spend real money for virtual robots to do the same thing you can do for free except now silly people that really like playing incestuous test tube babies who have a warrior based caste eugenics system can play their robots.

(The Clans in Battletech are largely considered to be where the game went off the rails for most of the old school players. It went from a semi Mad Max feeling universe into something with higher tech and bigger stakes. Plus the Clans broke gameplay balance for years until a somewhat refined points system got revised multiple times. Except their background is still ridiculous and stupid. They are something that would fit better into Warhammer 40,000 than the "hard" sci fi post apocalypse setting Battletech was before they showed up.)

So... let's get down and show more screenshots showing new patch notes and a couple pictures of new robots eh?

(I should probably have waited till tomorrow to get a third patch in but I try to get at least three posts to the blog each month. So here we go.)

(As always click for bigger.)

Yet more hero mechs continue to be released. Free to Play means trying to grab easy money from idiots. Hero mechs basically are taxes on the stupid.

More weapon tweaks. STILL. Autocannons got their maximum range reduced. Artillery and Air Strike modules got a rebalance while SRMs got their damage spread squished a little which might make them more useful. The uberpowerful Ultra Autocannon 5 had it's max range dropped into merely absurd levels. Both Small Laser types get a bit of a tiny range buff, and the Medium Pulse Laser gets a range increase and heat decrease. Maybe they realized hardly anyone was using them?

And some more bug fixes.

Two weeks later the Clans are introduced. Sort of. This is still Mechwarrior Online, the Mech game that content forgot after all.

New modules are introduced. I am not sure how many of these will get used but it does give the hard core players more things to grind for XP. I kind of like the Speed Retention modules. It might be a great thing to keep Light and Medium class mechs from dying the second they get legged. Instead it will be within half a minute so.. win?

And a screenshot inside the Mad Cat, aka Timber Wolf if you are a Furry Eugenic Space Nazi.

So overall I have no real quarrel with the Clan mecha so far. I would MUCH rather see meaningful game content though. As it is I honestly want to go back to Mechwarriors 2-4 (Mercenaries) because there is actually fun and interesting things to do, not just endless team deathmatches.